The Colonel turned in an honest and detailed report. It was not his decision whether or not to grant the licence.
Chapter 8
SINCE LAST YEAR, when Cobbler’s Dream had captured a thief and saved his own life by clearing the impossible spiked park fence, Steve had begun to jump him again.
The Cobbler had once been a famous juvenile show jumper. When the girl who trained him grew too big, he was bought by a hard-handed child who wanted a vehicle for winning championships, rather than a pony to love. Steve worked for her father. He had to see the marvellous pony making mistakes because of the child. Finally he had to see him blinded in one eye by a blow from a whip. He had taken him away then, and brought him to the farm, and they had both stayed here.
The other eye became half blind, but Cobby had adapted so well that he was almost as surefooted as before, and his fantastic leap over the Manor park fence had proved that he had acquired some kind of sixth sense to judge a jump. He would jump almost anything if you took him slow and let him get the feel of it.
Steve put up some sheep hurdles in one of the fields, and he and Dora made a brush jump with gorse stuck through a ladder. Most of the other horses were too old and stiff to jump, so Dora was teaching the mule Willy, who had no mouth at all, and either rushed his jumps flat out or stopped dead and let Dora jump without him.
Steve and Dora had the afternoon off, so they took the Cobbler and Willy through the woods on the other side of their hill, where there were fallen tree trunks across the rides. Cobby jumped them all without checking his canter, bunching his muscles, arching his back, smoothly away on his landing stride with his ears pricked for the next jump. Willy jumped the smaller trees. If they did not reach right across the path, he whipped round them with his mouth open, yawing at the bit. If they were too big, he dug in his toes, and Dora had to get off and lead him over. He would jump his front end, stand and stare with the tree trunk under his middle, and then heave his rear end over with a grunt like an old man getting out of the bath.
Near the far edge of the wood, Cobby shortened his stride, trotting with his head high, and turned to the side, listening.
‘What does he hear?’
There were people who came to the woods with guns and shot at rabbits and foxes and anything that moved. Sometimes they shot each other.
Steve and Dora both stopped and listened. Only the continual sigh of the breeze moving through the tops of the tall trees.
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Cobby does. His hearing is sharper now that he can’t see much. So is his nose.’
The chestnut pony had his nostrils squared, as if he was getting a message.
Steve pushed him on, over two more jumps, but he slowed down again, listening.
‘There is something. Let’s go the way he wants to.’
They rode out of the wood and along the edge of a cornfield. In a grassy lane beyond the hedge, a grey horse was grazing in a patch of clover.
It was a calm horse. It stood still and exchanged blown breaths with Cobby, and then the ritual squeal and striking out. The mule laid back his long ears like a rabbit and said nothing. He distrusted strange horses. When he was turned out with a new one, he would communicate for the first two weeks only with his heels.
The grey horse wore a head collar. It let Steve slip his belt through the noseband, and trotted quietly beside Cobby back to the farm.
The Colonel did not recognize the horse. ‘Someone will be worried though,’ he said. ‘It’s a nice-looking horse and well kept.’ The grey looked like a hunter, coat clean and silky, whiskers and heels neatly trimmed, tail and mane properly pulled. ‘Better ring the police, Steve.’
Sergeant Oddie said at once, ‘Oh no! Not that grey again. Look here, I’ve got the big wedding to worry about, two men off on a drug raid, a three-car crash on the Marston road and some nippers have set fire to the bus shelter. That horse is the last thing I need.’
‘It’s been out before?’
‘Time and again. The neighbours are on my neck about it day and night. Regular wasps’ nest, it’s stirred up. Here, I’ll give you Mrs Jordan’s number, and I wish you’d tell her how to build a fence to keep a horse in.’
‘But we have,’ Mrs Jordan said. ‘It’s not our fault, or the horse’s. Oh dear. I’ll come and get him.’
‘I’ll ride him home, if you could bring me back,’ Steve said.
The grey horse looked like a lovely ride, and he was, well schooled, a beautiful mover, quickly responsive, but you could stop him by flexing your wrist.
Steve was surprised when he saw where he came from. The Jordans’ house on the edge of a small town had obviously once stood in fields, but new houses had been built close all round, and the fenced paddock was not much bigger than a tennis court. The fence was strong and high enough. The gate looked sound.
‘It’s they who are doing it,’ Mrs Jordan told Steve. ‘They used to do it at night, but they’re getting bolder now, and they’ve begun to do it in the daytime if I go out.’
‘Who do what?’
‘The neighbours. The people in that pink house with gnomes in the garden and plastic flowers in the window-boxes. They open the gate and let David out, then they quickly ring the Police and complain that the horse is loose and trampling on people’s gardens.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, I know all right.’ Mrs Jordan was a faded, once beautiful woman, with lines of work and worry round her big sad eyes and her full, drooping mouth. ‘When the police were here last time – they were nice enough at first, but now they’re getting fed up – I saw that front curtain move, and another time, the woman was standing in the window, blatantly watching and laughing.’
‘Why don’t you padlock the gate?’
‘We have. But she somehow pried the rails loose at night, and then got them back up after she’d chased David out. It’s her, not her husband. He’s not so bad, but she’s a fanatic. She hates horses, because she thinks they’re something that rich people have. Rich! She’s much better off than us. Her husband is a plumber. But she’s the kind of person who can’t stand anybody having something she hasn’t got, even if she doesn’t want it. She wants to buy that piece of land where David’s paddock is, and breed chinchillas.
‘Chinchillas!’ She looked at Steve with her tragic eyes. ‘On what was once our back lawn, where the girls used to have their summer house and swings.’
After they had put the grey horse away in the open shed in the corner of the paddock, Mrs Jordan made Steve go into the house for something to eat before she would drive him home. She seemed lonely, glad of someone to talk to. He sat in a comfortable shabby armchair and listened. He had learned from the Colonel that if you will only shut up and listen, people will tell you things they won’t tell to someone who is trying to keep up their end of the conversation.
It was a tragic story. Her husband had been a trainer and show judge. A car crash had killed their younger daughter and left him unable to work for a long time. They had to borrow money on their house and land. Their other daughter Nancy left college and went to work, and Mrs Jordan got a job in an old people’s nursing home, but they could not pay the interest on the mortgage. Four acres of their land had been seized, and sold to the builder who had put up all these ugly little houses where the pastures and stables had been.
All the horses had gone, of course, except David, who had belonged to the dead girl.
‘How could we part with him? Nancy rides him occasionally, but she has so little time, and she’s always so tired. We’re all tired, Steve. My husband has a part-time job now, but it doesn’t pay much, and he’s not well enough even for that. I lie awake night after night wondering what will happen when they take our house in the end and that horrible woman gets David’s paddock – our last bit of land – and keeps her wretched chinchillas in prison cages.’
‘Death row.’ Steve nodded. ‘Only one way out.’
‘I hate her.’
‘So do I,’ Steve said with feeling, although he had never seen the woman with the plaster gnomes in her garden.
‘Sergeant Oddie rang me up after he talked to you, and said if the horse got out again, we’d have to get rid of him.’
‘I thought the sergeant was so busy,’ Steve said.
‘Not too busy to tell me that. And that’s what that woman wants.’
‘Why don’t you turn her in?’
‘I can’t prove it. She’s cunning. I’ve never been able to catch her.’
‘Mind if I try?’
‘It’s not much use.’
‘You all go out some night. Make a big noise about driving off in the car, so she knows. But I’ll be here. I’ll be in the shed with David.’
No need to tell the Colonel. Not that he would mind, but … no need to worry him.
‘I can’t risk any trouble,’ he had said. He had his own problems with neighbours. ‘We’ve got to stay on the right side of the law.’
Well, this was the right side, but … no need to tell him.
Steve did not tell Dora either, or anyone at the farm.
Chapter 9
THE NEXT EVENING, after the horses had been bedded down and fed and watered, Steve asked if he could use the truck.
‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘What for?’
‘I’m going out.’
‘Who with?’ Dora’s rumpled head came over the top of a stable door, where she was rubbing liniment on Dolly’s chronic foreleg.
‘A girl I know.’
‘You don’t know any girls.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You’d tell me.’
Dora rested her chin on the door. Old Doll put her head out beside her and laid back her ears at Steve. She had once been so badly abused by a man that she still only liked women. It was Dolly who had kicked the Colonel in the head.
‘You’d be the last person I’d tell.’ Steve laughed. ‘You’d want to come too, and sit between us and talk all through the film.’
‘Are you going to a film?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to come too.’
‘No.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Nancy.’
‘I don’t believe you’re going out with a girl,’ Dora said, but more doubtfully.
When he drove off, Dora was sitting on the wall by the gate, polishing a snaffle bit and kicking her heels against the bricks. Her face looked closed and sulky, her lower lip stuck out. Steve waved. She did not wave back or look up.
Mr Jordan was a grey, stooped man, with a mouth stiffened by pain of body and heart. Nancy was a bright-cheeked girl with thick bouncing hair and good legs, the kind of girl Steve would have gone to the cinema with if he had been going to the cinema with a girl.
They made the necessary noise about leaving. Racing the engine, slamming the doors, going back for a coat, calling out that they would be late.
‘The film starts at eight!’ Mrs Jordan called from behind the wheel, to let her neighbours know that they would be away at least two hours.
In the pink house with the window-boxes full of impossible flowers that never bloomed in the spring, nor even in England at all, a shadow moved behind the curtain.
Steve sat in the straw of the open shed and talked to the grey horse and thought about things long gone. Other nights of adventure: when you waited, with your nerves on edge and your hair pricking on your scalp. The night when he had stolen Cobby away to safety with sacking wrapped round his hooves.
About nine-thirty, with the family still in the cinema, David raised his head from his hay and swung his small ears forward. Steve listened, holding his breath.
Were there footsteps on the soft ground? Did the night breeze shiver that bush, or was someone behind it? Steve watched, motionless in the dark corner.
David, who liked people, walked out of the shed in a rustle of straw and into the paddock. A thick woman in tight pants was climbing through the fence. She held out her hand as the horse went up to her and gave him something. In the still night, Steve heard his teeth on the sugar. He followed the woman as she moved quickly across the small paddock to the gate.
Steve waited. It was too dark to see much. She had her back to him, but he heard the clink of the chain on the gate. He got up quickly, went silently up behind her and said in her ear, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh my God!’ The woman jumped round with a hand on the ample shelf over her heart. As she moved, Steve was almost sure that he saw her fist clench over a piece of metal that could be a key.
‘What do you want?’ She was breathing fast, and he could see behind her dark fringe tomorrow’s imagined headlines chasing each other through her head.
WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED. HOUSEWIFE KILLED IN NEIGHBOUR’S GARDEN. SUBURBAN SLAYING, MYSTERY GROWS.
‘What you – what are you doing here?’ The woman must be bold to have done as much as she had, but her mouth was twitching now with nerves, because Steve was looming over her threateningly.
‘I’m a friend of the family,’ he said. ‘The horse looked as if he might be headed for colic, so I was watching he didn’t lie down. Someone might have slipped him something. People round here have been making trouble, you wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Oh, I know.’ The woman relaxed. ‘The poor Jordans, it’s dreadful for them, on top of all their bad luck. I try to keep an eye on things for them, when they’re not here. That’s why I came out, to check on the gate fastening.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Steve. ‘To check the gate.’
‘That’s right.’ The woman started to move towards her house. ‘To check the gate.’
‘You keep an eye on things. That’s nice.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘one does what one can. We were all put in this world to help each other, that’s what I say.’
‘Oh so do I.’ With a hand on the neck of the grey horse, Steve watched the woman climb through the paddock fence and go back into her own house, waggling her bottom righteously, like a good neighbour who has done her duty.
‘So that’s what you ought to do,’ Steve told the Jordans.
They looked at each other. ‘I’m no hand with electricity.’ The father looked baffled.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘She’ll see you.’ Mrs Jordan glanced towards the pink house. ‘She sees everything.’
‘I’ll do it after dark. There’s no moon. She won’t try anything on tomorrow after the scare she got tonight. If I use a rubber hammer, I can get the insulators on without making any noise, and I’ll put the battery behind the shed so she won’t hear it ticking.’
Next day, Steve offered to do Anna’s shopping, and bought the battery and thin wire and the insulators while he was in town.
In the evening, when he asked casually for the truck, Dora did not ask him where he was going. She had not allowed herself to ask him about the film last night, which was a good thing because he had forgotten to find out what was on.
At the Jordans he rigged up two strands of electric wire close to the paddock rails where it could not be seen. Then he turned on the battery and waited at the side of the shed.
He chirruped softly. The horse came up to the rail, put out his nose, then jumped back and snorted.
‘Sorry, David.’ The grey horse stood in the middle of the paddock, looking very offended. ‘I had to test it.’
Two nights Steve waited in the straw, with the battery ticking softly on the other side of the shed. He dozed and woke and dozed, but he was sleepy in the daytime, and Dora made embittered remarks about people who stayed out so late with girls that they couldn’t do their jobs properly.
Why not tell her and let her watch with him in the shed and share the adventure? Because she kept saying things like, ‘When are we going to see this famous Nancy? Not that I care. Or is she too hideous to bring here?’ Talking herself out of the adventure.
‘She’s gorgeous, as a matter of fact,’ Steve said, irritated. ‘Marve
llous legs.’ He winked at Slugger.
‘Can’t go far wrong with that.’ Slugger winked at the horse he was grooming. ‘“When judgin’ a woman or a horse, you gotta look at the legs, of course.” That’s what me grandad used to say.’
‘Anyone can have good legs.’ Dora’s, which were rather muscular and boyish, were covered in torn faded blue jeans, which she refused to let Anna patch, or hem at the bottom.
On the third night, Steve went to bed early – ‘What’s the matter? She sick of you already?’ – and got up again at midnight after everyone was asleep. He stopped the truck before he got to the Jordans’, and walked quietly through what was left of their garden and round the side of the house to the shed. When he whispered, to show the horse he was there, a voice answered him.
‘Nancy?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She was lying covered with straw, only her face and hair showing.
‘I wanted to do this alone.’ Steve came in and sat beside her.
‘Why?’
‘It was my idea.’
‘It’s my horse.’
They lay side by side in the straw and talked softly. Nancy told him about the man at work she thought she was in love with. Girls always started to tell you about other men just when you were getting interested.
Steve wriggled his fingers through the straw to find her hand. ‘But he’s almost old enough to be my father,’ Nancy said.
Steve took her hand, and at that moment there was a bloodcurdling scream from the other side of the paddock.
David jumped. Steve and Nancy scrambled up. The plump woman in the tight pants was sitting on the ground with her arms wrapped round herself like a straitjacket, rocking backwards and forwards and moaning.
‘It can’t have been that bad.’ Steve and Nancy slid carefully under the fence and went across to her.
‘Oh, I’m killed,’ the woman moaned. ‘Oh, my heart—’
‘Just going to check up on the gate, eh?’
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